GNxDDD Does Bootcamp!

Round 6: Amenders Assembled (MCU)

I'm nothing special. I'm just a twenty-year-old girl named Addie who, up until April was trying to study journalism but now cannot because our lecturer...poofed! Yeah, her and half the cohort. I was in class when it happened. The few of us who remained were chocking on dust for the few minutes after. It was the worst moment of my life, but little did I know, the day would get worse.

I went straight home after the incident. We decided the lecturer could no longer record attendance so what did it matter if we skipped class? I went home with a crazy story to tell but realised when I got there I had no one to tell it too.

I turned on the news. The presenter looked as though he had been crying. At the bottom of the screen it flashed that something had happened; half the population of the world had vanished. No one knew for sure what had happened, but people were pointing their fingers at the Avengers, well actually the Avengers and some freaky space stones. It had cost half the world.

Growing up in New York City makes you particularly good at being able to think on your feet. I was only eleven when I heard the roars of the Hulk, two blocks away. I was fourteen when the New York incident happened. School was out for two months. A little group of people saved the world and claimed they would protect it but nowhere felt safe after that. The Avengers just made it worse. The president got kidnapped once, we watched weird things happen in London, our national security agency fell apart and then Sokovia happened. Things didn't get as bad as Sokovia again, but more events happened; an airport was shut down, so some full-grown adults could have a punch up, a kid in a red and blue morph-suit started showing himself down-town, a Thomas the Tank Engine ruined a house, a street in Hong Kong got trashed. We were too in awe to stay angry at the super heroes until this happened. My whole family paid the price because the Avengers failed to save the world.

Many people felt the same way as me. The Avengers only prolonged the world's fate. They took on too much, too fast and joined battles they could never have dreamed of winning. They made Earth a hotspot for aliens hoping to try out their abilities.

I was pissed off after my family disappeared. After crying my heart out for two weeks straight, I joined a student organisation with a goal of fixing the world. Amongst the organisation were five engineering students who were certain that if they put their heads together, they could create a time machine. The history student in our group delivered five speeches on why the best our only hope to save the world was by travelling back to the 1940s. Why the 1940s? Our future Historian kindly explained that it was because Steve Rogers was rising to fame and if we were going to time travel, the most effective time to visit would be then, what they noted as "the beginning of the end".

I'm no genius but the organisation was full of them.

The time machine was ready for use in three months. We were all in agreement that we needed to speak to Steve Rogers, we needed to convince him things were going to get really bad in the future and that we were certain that he needed to advocate for the sake of humanity and push to get rid of that very first space stone.

What was my part in this mission? Nothing. Well actually, it was nothing but moral support and motivational 'you-can-do-it!' fist pumps but then the time came where we had to discuss who it was that was going to be put inside this time machine. The group decided on me, probably the least qualified of them all, only because being a journalism-student they thought that I would have the best communication skills. I was freaked out but then I realized I probably was the most qualified for this task for I truly had nothing to lose.

Our future historian was the one who pulled the mission together, in the end. She sourced out periodical clothing, found out exactly where we needed to put the time machine, so I could be in proximity to Steve Rogers on the day we agreed to go back on and gave me a crash course on all I needed to know about the super-soldier. We decided a day was the maximum time I would spend in 1943 in order to safely get back to present. When I would be brought back was solely reliant on my friends on the other side of time.

When it finally happened, I felt nothing. It was like a flash. To beat time the thing had to be faster than time. It felt like a second, but it could have been years. I went from being in a space the size of a toilet cubicle to spontaneously appearing in a movie theatre, where the very man I sought after was on the big screen shooting some gross depiction of a certain dictator. I blink, taken aback as I realized the seat on my left was being occupied by the all-American-hero himself.

"Hi..." I whispered to Steve Rogers who seemed unaware that I had not been seated there the whole entire time. "Listen, I don't have a lot of time but-"

"I'll stop you right there." He whispered back, "It's okay I'm used to it. You want to know how you can buy bonds, right?"

"No, actually." I shook my head as I pulled a few crumpled pieces of paper from the pocket of my coat. "You see this will sound crazy but I'm from 2018 and I need your help because the world's pretty much ended."

"What do you mean?" Steve Rogers asked as I handed him a picture of the stone they called the Tesseract. "What is this?"

"Don't ask questions. Just listen, okay?" I asserted as I pointed to the cube. "It's the Tesseract. Surely, you've heard of it? My friend said Erskine would have filled you in by now."

"How do you know Erskine?" Steve asked, looking concerned as I handed him another piece of paper; a photocopy of a newspaper dated July 22nd, 2011 and detailing the discovery and retrieval of Captain America from the ice.

"I don't know him. I've just read about him. He's dead, now isn't he? Killed by Hydra." I asked, and Steve nodded looking even more on-edge. I sighed to myself and put my focus back on the task, "That's an article on you. You get the chance to fight soon and you save the world, but it was at a cost. You took down Schmidt but the plane you were on was lost. They found you in 2011 in a state of hibernation, I suppose. A 70-year coma."

"What did that mean for me?" Steve asked as he analysed the article.

"It's wild." I almost laughed, "You won't believe it. You were recruited in a superhero team! You battled aliens in 2012 and again in 2018 but this time something went wrong, and half the world paid the price. Both incidences were because of the Tesseract. It was with you in the plane and Howard Stark found it after the plane went down. The world had it until 2012."

I handed him the article I had on the 2018 event and let him take a few minutes to read it. He's attitude was shifting, I watched as the statistics hit him.

"What do want me to do?" Steve asked as he looked up from the paper.

"Convince Stark to strap the stone to a rocket. Send it off Earth." I said as I handed him the final piece of paper I had on me, "In return I want to give you this; the co-ordinates for where you were found in 2011. You give Stark this and he'll find you."

I was flashed away just before the end of the movie. When I was let out of the machine, I found myself in the same building as 1943 except I was on the stage and to my left was Tony Stark, speaking to an audience through a microphone. My student friends stood beside me, looking to Stark. In the front row sat my family who were smiling up at me and beside them was an elderly man.

"There we go folks." Tony Stark spoke, "These kids have successfully built the first ever time machine and here we have our first ever time-traveller, who, if I can verify met our very own Cap."

The light shined on the elderly man in the front row and he nodded, giving me a knowing smile. There was Steve Rogers, ninety years old.

I'm nothing special but I did save the world.